Christmas Island’s only echolocating bat has gone extinct

The Christmas Island pipistrelle, a bat species found only on an Australian island, has been declared extinct. The final nail in the coffin was hammered in as part of the latest update to the Red List of Threatened Species, which is maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

“It’s very difficult to decide when a species definitely has gone extinct,” says Craig Hilton-Taylor, head of the IUCN’s Red List unit.

But the last Christmas Island pipistrelle was seen in 2009. “It’s not a cryptic species, it’s got a distinctive call,” says Hilton-Taylor. “We probably could have declared it extinct earlier, but we’ve been waiting for surveys.”

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The Thongaree’s disc-nosed bat, a newly-discovered species that lives in a small region of Thailand, entered the list as critically endangered – just one step from going extinct. “If we’d known about it earlier, it would have moved through the categories. That’s just what happened unseen until now,” says Hilton-Taylor.

The new list isn’t all bad news for bats. The Rodrigues flying fox moves from critically endangered to endangered. Hilton-Taylor says that’s due to coordinated actions by the government and local organisations, including legal protection and habitat restoration.

Anti-antelope actions

The outlook isn’t so bright for five species of African antelope. The world’s largest antelope, the giant eland, is considered vulnerable, with a global population of 14,000 at most. Meanwhile the southern lechwe and grey rhebok are near threatened, and the mountain reedbuck and Heuglin’s gazelle are in the endangered category.

Much of their decline is due to human expansion into their habitat, as well as illegal poaching for bushmeat. “There is a strong economic side to this,” says Hilton-Taylor. “A lot of people in Africa don’t have access to good reliable food sources and bushmeat is an easy path to income and food.”

Deforestation has had a devastating effect on invertebrates in Madagascar. The Rumpelstiltskin pygmy grasshopper, a flightless species only known to inhabit one forest, is critically endangered. Almost 40 per cent of Madagascar’s pygmy grasshoppers are threatened with extinction. Habitat loss has also put the shiny giant pill millipede, which lives in a coastal rainforest in Saint Luce, in the critically endangered category.

“Habitat loss is one of the most invasive threats across all the species,” Hilton-Taylor says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re on continents or islands.”

For the North American ash tree, that’s not the issue. An invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer, introduced to the US and Canada in the late 1990s, has been foraging its way through forests across the continent and leaving death in its wake.

Five of the six most widespread ash tree species are now critically endangered.
“They could well go extinct in the next 100 years if the beetle has its way,” Hilton-Taylor says.